Wondering what SkyTruth has been up to lately? Here’s a quick rundown:
Pearl Award
We were honored to receive the 2014 Jean and Leslie Douglas Pearl Award, given to those “dedicated to improving the lives of others and to providing a sustainable earth for future generations.”
Pollution – Oil and Gas – Fracking
MSNBC interviewed us for a story on the chronic Taylor Energy oil leak in the Gulf.
Associated Press interviewed us for an in-depth story and video featuring our work monitoring and documenting chronic oil pollution in the Gulf of Mexico associated with offshore oil and gas development; covered in major media outlets including Seattle Times, Houston Chronicle, Washington Post. Followup action resulted almost immediately as Senator Nelson demands more information from federal agencies.
North Dakota regulators are finally cracking down on excessive, wasteful flaring of natural gas from oil wells. We’ve worked to provide daylight on this issue in a variety of ways, including our global flaring map and dataset.
Our testimony, meetings with regulators, and public critiques regarding the public disclosure of chemicals used in fracking are having a positive effect, as some significant improvements were recently announced.
We detected a vessel fishing illegally in Palau’s waters and provided real-time, hot-pursuit support that helped Palau intercept the culprits in the nick of time, far out at sea. NPR covered the story.
Yale360 wrote about our work on the Global Fishing Watch project with Oceana and Google, analyzing big data to map fishing activity throughout the ocean and illustrate how well – or poorly – marine protected areas are being managed.
Skytruthing
Fast Company profiled our work, highlighting the “watchdog” role that satellite image monitoring can play in encouraging better performance by government and industry.
This article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describes our FrackFinder program of crowdsourcing to engage citizen-scientists in analyzing imagery and producing useful data.
Partnerships – Events
We gave a presentation on our vessel-tracking work at a meeting attended by dozens of representatives from federal government agencies.
We participated in a roundtable discussion at the Center for a New American Security focused on developing information-sharing platforms for large areas of interest to multiple nations.
On May 19 we’ll give a presentation at a workshop hosted by National Geographic, NOAA and the State Department on monitoring and enforcement strategies for marine protected areas.
In June we’ll be at the Economist World Ocean Summit in Portugal to present progress on Global Fishing Watch, including some research results, with our Oceana and Google partners.